作者:瑞恩·克拉克
CHS通讯总监

Joneen Lowman, PhD, CCC-SLP, and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) has received the Fellowship of the Association Award from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA).

“这让我很惭愧，”洛曼说. “It recognizes individuals who have made contributions to the profession above and beyond daily clinical service. 你知道, 我们都喜欢得到赞扬, and it feels good to have our work acknowledged, for others to say you have made a difference. But we really do this for the patients. 如果我们能更好地培训供应商, then they get better care — and I know that may sound, 你知道, 陈词滥调. 但我真的觉得这是事实.”

Lowman是LinKS的项目总监, a Department of Education grant to train graduate CSD students in the use of telepractice with the school-age population, 以及国家情报局局长 Center for Telehealth Education, 研究 and Outreach, including the interprofessional telehealth graduate certificate. 

Richard Andreatta, PhD, an ASHA Fellow and professor in CSD and the Rehabilitation and Health Sciences Doctoral Program (RHB-DP)，提名洛曼.  

“Her co-sponsors, Chad Gladden, AuD, CCC-A, (Dept. of Veterans Affairs) and Melissa Jakubowitz, MA, CCC-SLP, ASHA Fellow (Founder/President - eLive现在) and I have conferred and determined that Dr. Lowman has made truly ‘outstanding’ contributions to Communication Sciences & Disorders (CSD) in the three areas of 临床 Education & 学术教学、研究 & Publications, and Service to ASHA,安德雷阿塔写道.

“We will convey to the Honors committee a story of an individual who, 在她的职业生涯中, has championed the vital importance of technology use as a crucial lever for training students and practicing clinicians to provide needed speech/language services to those who are isolated from these necessary resources.”

关于洛曼的职业生涯, she has promoted the use of telepractice methods to realize her educational, 研究, and clinical training initiatives and goals, Andreatta说.

“She understood the important potential for telepractice treatment modes long before many of her colleagues across the country did,他说. “Her foresight in this area proved prescient when the COVID pandemic engulfed our national clinical practice and fundamentally altered our therapy services and delivery methods.”

In 2016, she began training speech language pathologists (SLPs) to use telehealth to deliver their services with a focus on children in schools. The partnership made sense because schools always needed SLPs, so Lowman could train them to help children by using telehealth.

Then she wondered if they could expand their training services.

“We knew health care needed help,” Lowman said. “所以，我们想，‘让他们做好准备吧. 让我们打开它. 让我们训练每个人!’”

这一次, they reached out to their cohorts in CHS, namely those in the Physician Assistant and Physical Therapy programs and asked if they’d be interested in learning this new technique. 他们说是的.

于是，他们开始了. Three years ago, CHS was awarded a certificate in telehealth.

Then, inexplicably, the world changed, and COVID-19 thrust everyone indoors. Suddenly, the need for delivering health services via technology became much more in demand.

“During this stressful and uncertain time for clinical practice in CSD, Dr. Lowman provided a lifeline and critical just-in-time information to many different CSD constituencies including academic training programs, 现场临床医生, 管理员, 政策制定者,安德雷阿塔写道. “Dr. Lowman’s professional work in technology-infused education, 研究 and clinical service quickly became one of the key operating standards for best-practice in telehealth use and implementation. Her career-long and consistently outstanding 奉献 to clinical education, 研究 and professional service were the foundation for her ability to act decisively and provide leadership to our profession at a time of great uncertainty. Dr. Lowman’s career demonstrates that at the heart of leadership is preparation, 奉献, 以及行动的意愿.”

现在, in time for the second annual Telehealth Awareness Week — where the American Telemedicine Association recognizes the many ways virtual care improves access to quality healthcare services for all individuals, including members of rural and underserved communities — we also recognize Lowman for her achievements.

Lowman’s new plan is to offer a 400-level telehealth class at the undergraduate level open to students across health-related degree programs.

“What we’re really looking at doing is trying to take this diverse field of future health care providers that may not get any telehealth training and make sure that anybody that would come to our college at least, would have the option to get some basic fundamental training in telehealth,”她说。.